


Separation

by astolat



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Post-Trespasser, The Fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 10:12:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7840732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The great city of Virevarellan cannot be marked upon a map.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Separation

**Author's Note:**

> This is an odd sad little story I was inspired to finish off after seeing shati's wonderful [Dragon Age vid to Radioactive](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/vividcon2016/works/7779829).

The great city of Virevarellan cannot be marked upon a map. It does not stand in a single place. It might be nearer to say it stands in all places, for there is almost nowhere that a citizen of that city cannot reach without leaving its all-encompassing walls. The deep quiet of the forests, the roar of mountain streams, the music of the People, all these are contained within the city’s domain, and a traveler can cross from one wide ocean shore to the other. The ruins of lost Arlathan have been gently gathered up within the city’s orbit and renewed, ancient temples full of light with no false gods to darken them. The roads of Virevarellan wind through the Fade and the mortal world both, and its towers can ever be seen shining in the distance by those who stand upon those roads.

But there is one lost stronghold where no roads lead, where no eluvian stands. The wise do not seek that place. The only way to reach it is to begin in the dark places of the Fade, in one of the deep and still-broken hollows where mad spirits congregate, those who do not wish to be cured of their madness and reunited with the People. Freedom is the first law of the People now, and so the spirits are not forced to submit to healing, any more than the grey Qunari are forced to relinquish their faith or the Dalish are dragged into the city’s precincts to be reunited with the People. But like them, the twisted spirits are kept gently from the city precincts. They lurk instead among dark fragments of memory, moments preserved from the Time of Separation, and they feed on the violent intensity of the emotions that linger there.

Among those spirits one must go, and find in the deep mists the memory of a place that is no more: the place of the Breach, where the Veil began to fail, now buried in the mortal world beneath half a mountain’s weight of snow and sundered rock. There, where memories of conflagration and battle have been preserved by tidal waves of energy, one of skill and high mastery may pick out a faint and narrow path, almost lost: a track of footprints in snow, climbing away into the mountains at the top of the world.

That faded track will lead the wanderer who follows it closely enough back into the world of flesh. It takes a slow and punishing course through dark nameless peaks, wind-blasted and barren. If the bitter cold and desolation do not deter them, that wanderer must struggle onward for seven days and nights. And they must go on foot; no mount will obey whose head is turned that way. They scent the Wolf on the wind.

When dawn comes at the end of the seventh night, only then at last will the climber lay eyes on the great fortress of Tarasyl'an Te'las, where the world was first sundered, and where it was joined together once more. No spirits linger here, save a solitary spirit of compassion who visits, briefly, from time to time. Dangerous currents of wrath and grief, victory and regret, flow tidal within these high walls, and only those secured in flesh dare cross the narrow bridge and step uninvited inside.

Few who go there have returned, and those few have not spoken of it, save in whispers retold in whispers again before slipping out into story and song. Of these there are now a great obscuring multitude. In some the Dread Wolf prowls the walls and savages any who cross his path; in others, he sleeps deep in uthenera after his great labors. Or, some of the stories say, Fen’Harel kneels alone in a inner courtyard, silent, before a grave marked only by a single tree.

All of these stories are likely true, and more. Fen’Harel is not bound to one place and time any more than is the great city of the People that he raised up to replace the one he threw down. He drank the blood and power of a dozen gods in the struggle to undo the work of his own hands, and in the end burst the bounds of flesh and spirit and even time itself. He lives now in all times at once, and in an endless running moment that circles back upon itself like a maddened beast devouring its own tail.

As for the woman in the grave, none of the People alive now remember her name, save the Wolf himself, and he does not speak to visitors. The Qunari call her a name in their own tongue which means _breakwater_ , and deep in their fortress beneath the earth, the children of iron have raised a statue of her they call _The Shield_. The Dalish call her _the one who stands before the wave_ , and the Andrasteans call her _the Herald_. There are few homes in Thedas, outside the walls of Virevarellan, that do not have a little statue of her tucked into a niche somewhere, although no offerings are made her, nor requests or prayers. The mortals know that she was not a god; she merely stood against one to save them, and spent the immortal life he would have given her to break the terrible crashing wave he sent pouring back upon the world when he opened the dam he had built.

The People do not call her _the traitor_ anymore. It has been a long time since the Separation ended, and the Fade and the mortal earth have long since blended gently back into the reunion that she only delayed and slowed. Now they merely pity her, distantly, and the short-lived mortals she spared so pointlessly from destruction. Their own lives go on: endless, beautiful, unchanging. Virevarellan stands high and shining in its long peace, and the streets are not crowded.

# End


End file.
